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Does anyone have an explanation or a fix for why the "light" from a glow texture is usually a completely different shade from the fill colour?  I have a bunch of LED tubes I'm rendering with a glow texture set to the fill colour of the objects.  In OpenGL I set the fills and get a nice selection of blues and purples across the stage, but when I render I basically get two colours, light cyan/blue and magenta.  Thoughts?  Or do other people run in to this as well?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

I normally recommend controlling the glow's color via the Glow shader itself directly, and leaving the base Color shader of the texture set to pure white or a warm/cool white instead. This means creating and applying more than one Glow texture, but I find it's much better at giving me control over the end result. 

OpenGL will not show Glow at all, nor will it give an accurate representation of what a texture color will look like in a scene that is utilizing indirect lighting. 

You MIGHT be able to get proper results if your base attribute colors on the tubes are the only thing controlling color, and the Glow shader is using a pure white, but if that still doesn't seem to be working for you, or if thats what you tried in the first place, send me your file and I can take a closer look.

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9 minutes ago, JimW said:

I normally recommend controlling the glow's color via the Glow shader itself directly, and leaving the base Color shader of the texture set to pure white or a warm/cool white instead. This means creating and applying more than one Glow texture, but I find it's much better at giving me control over the end result. 

OpenGL will not show Glow at all, nor will it give an accurate representation of what a texture color will look like in a scene that is utilizing indirect lighting. 

You MIGHT be able to get proper results if your base attribute colors on the tubes are the only thing controlling color, and the Glow shader is using a pure white, but if that still doesn't seem to be working for you, or if thats what you tried in the first place, send me your file and I can take a closer look.

 

I'll give that a shot and see what the results are compared to what I am doing right now.  Right now my glow texture is set to take the object colour, with the glow set to white.  This was more for speed, this way I can have one texture to worry about and can quickly assign colours by simply selecting the objects and changing the object fill colour.  Right now I have the glow texture set to brightness 400 to get the amount of light I want out of them, but I'm wondering if that is causing the colours to 'bloom' to white.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Ahh that can mess with the color values as well, any time you get the brightness over 200-300 or even just above 100, the colors will wash out or combine strangely. You can avoid this by increasing the brightness of the scene using a Renderworks Camera's Exposure camera effect instead of manually turning the brightness way up.

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23 minutes ago, JimW said:

Ahh that can mess with the color values as well, any time you get the brightness over 200-300 or even just above 100, the colors will wash out or combine strangely. You can avoid this by increasing the brightness of the scene using a Renderworks Camera's Exposure camera effect instead of manually turning the brightness way up.

 

Is the only way to increase exposure to use a camera object?  Or can this also be done in walkthrough as well?  That could potentially solve two issues at the same time.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Yes, it's the only real exposure control at the moment. I use camera objects in conjunction with sheet layer viewports. If you already have a viewport set up in a perspective walkthrough view, you can add a camera by simply editing the viewport, selecting Edit Camera (even if it wasnt created from one) then placing a camera anywhere and clicking "Match Current View" in the cameras object info palette, then you don't have to use walkthrough to set the view up again and can still start enabling camera effect.

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23 minutes ago, JimW said:

Yes, it's the only real exposure control at the moment. I use camera objects in conjunction with sheet layer viewports. If you already have a viewport set up in a perspective walkthrough view, you can add a camera by simply editing the viewport, selecting Edit Camera (even if it wasnt create from one) then placing a camera anywhere and clicking Match Current View" in the cameras object info palette, then you don't have to use walkthrough to set the view up again and can still start enabling camera effect.

Awesome, thanks Jim

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  • 2 years later...
On 6/19/2018 at 5:14 PM, PVA - Jim said:

You MIGHT be able to get proper results if your base attribute colors on the tubes are the only thing controlling color. 

 

Had a similar issue than @Anthony Neary, and this was the correct solution for me. Thank you.  

 

 

On 6/19/2018 at 5:14 PM, PVA - Jim said:

I normally recommend controlling the glow's color via the Glow shader itself directly, and leaving the base Color shader of the texture set to pure white or a warm/cool white instead. This means creating and applying more than one Glow texture, but I find it's much better at giving me control over the end result. 

 

This works as well but in my case I preferred to assigned a color to each light individually, precisely because I don't want 300 glow textures. 

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